All News (Page 371)

Boards across major public companies are replacing CEOs at the fastest pace in more than a decade — often elevating first-time leaders and insiders who must quickly prove they can adapt their organizations to an AI-centric future. AI adoption is accelerating across every business function. And quietly, almost invisibly, companies are losing the one thing that makes both of those forces navigable: institutional memory.

It’s been estimated that the cost of “corporate amnesia” — or inefficient knowledge sharing — can top tens of millions annually. Yet almost no one in the boardroom is talking about it.

AI may transform how organizations operate, but without a record of how they have made decisions, navigated crises, and earned trust over time, even the most sophisticated systems risk becoming disconnected from the experience that makes intelligence meaningful.

When CEOs Leave, the Lessons Leave With Them 

Leadership transitions are a natural part of organizational life. Boards often seek new leadership when markets shift or strategies change, and today’s environment — defined by technological disruption, geopolitical instability, and rapidly evolving consumer expectations — has only accelerated that cycle. Consider Boeing, Nike, and Stellantis: each navigated a recent CEO transition while simultaneously managing deep operational or reputational crises that demanded intimate knowledge of how the organization had failed and recovered before.

When CEOs depart, they rarely leave alone. Senior teams move on, long-tenured executives retire, and the institutional knowledge those leaders carry quietly disappears.

A company’s most valuable knowledge is often embedded in years or decades of decisions, pivots, failures, and breakthroughs. It lives in boardroom debates, cultural inflection points, product launches, regulatory battles, and moments when leaders had to choose between competing priorities under pressure. Without deliberate efforts to capture and preserve that experience, succession planning becomes little more than a leadership handoff — not a transfer of organizational knowledge.

Your AI Is Only as Smart as Your History 

This matters even more in the age of AI. As companies adopt generative AI and agentic systems, many assume that access to powerful models will create an advantage. In reality, the opposite may be true. If every company has access to similar AI systems, competitive differentiation may increasingly depend on the quality of the context from which those systems draw.

That context comes from experience — which, over time, becomes institutional memory: the accumulated record of how an organization has navigated complexity, balanced risk and opportunity, responded to crises, and built relationships with its stakeholders. Without that, intelligence — human or artificial — becomes generic.

Large language models can generate remarkably fluent answers, but without being grounded in a company’s specific history, decisions, and operating norms, those outputs often feel shallow or disconnected from reality. They can produce information. They cannot produce insight.

Just as the digital era required investment in data infrastructure, the age of AI will require infrastructure that preserves and activates institutional memory — including historical records, internal documentation, oral histories, and digital knowledge systems that allow organizations to learn from their own experiences. Increasingly, these systems will also inform AI tools themselves, grounding machine-generated insights in an enterprise’s real history rather than generic training data.

How Booz Allen Turned 110 Years Into a Strategic Edge 

When Booz Allen turned 110, CEO Horacio Rozanski didn’t just commission a retrospective. Through executive interviews, storytelling initiatives, and a digital archives platform, the company captured pivotal moments across its history — advising the U.S. Navy before World War II, supporting NASA during the space race — and connected those stories to its current identity as a technology and analytics leader. The effort wasn’t nostalgic. It was operational. 

The Archive Isn’t Missing — It’s Just Scattered 

The deeper problem isn’t preserving the memories of departing executives. It’s preserving the accumulated experience of the institution itself. It is preserving the accumulated experience of the institution itself. That experience, often built over decades, lives in strategy documents, research reports, correspondence, internal publications, photographs, and other records that explain how the organization became what it is.

In many companies, this material is scattered across fragmented digital systems or buried in analog archives that have never been systematically organized. In the age of AI, that presents a strategic vulnerability. AI learns from data. If the knowledge that defines an organization’s experience is inaccessible or lost entirely, those systems will produce incomplete, generic intelligence. The question for leaders is no longer simply whether they will adopt AI — it’s whether they will deploy it in a way that reflects their organization’s hard-won experience.

Target illustrates what’s at stake. The company faces a leadership transition amid declining sales, brand confusion, and growing political pressure. Analysts argue that it has drifted from the distinctive identity that once set it apart — its design-driven merchandising, curated product mix, and cultural positioning that inspired shoppers to jokingly pronounce the brand’s name like a French boutique. What’s less discussed is whether any of that accumulated brand intelligence — the decisions, trade-offs, and creative instincts that built “Tar-zhay” — was ever formally captured. Or whether it simply walked out the door with the leaders who built it.

The challenge for an incoming CEO is not just operational — it is interpretive. Which aspects of the organization’s identity should be preserved? Which strategies have worked historically? Which lessons from past crises still matter?

Before your company deploys its next AI system, ask this: What does that system actually know about how your organization makes decisions? If the answer is “not much,” you haven’t built an intelligent enterprise. You’ve built a very fast amnesiac.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Jessica Mathews here, filling in for Allie to give you a quick update on some recent reporting that looks at the pushback that Elon Musk’s companies are getting around the country.

Last week, I wrote about the lawsuit that Baltimore’s mayor and city council had filed against xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company. The lawsuit accuses Grok of exposing residents to the risk that any photograph they uploaded—of themselves or of their children—could be ingested by Grok and transformed into sexually degrading deepfakes without their knowledge or consent.

Not long after that lawsuit was filed, the Baltimore Ravens’ football team announced it was walking away from a tunnel proposal it had pitched to Boring Company, for a free tunnel project around its Ravens stadium. And the Baltimore Mayor, a Democrat, said publicly that he wouldn’t have approved it anyway.

The sentiment shift in Baltimore, in particular, was notable, as the city had a decade ago welcomed Elon Musk’s business with open arms.

Here’s more, from the story:

Maryland and Baltimore have historically welcomed Musk’s companies through incentives and partnerships. Former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, a Republican, was one of the first politicians to publicly get behind a major Boring Company project in 2017, when Boring Company announced it planned to build a high-speed tunnel for autonomous vehicles between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The Maryland Department of Transportation sponsored the project, and Baltimore’s then-Mayor, a Democrat, had said the project would have “tremendous potential.” 

That posture has shifted since Musk donated $300 million to President Trump’s campaign and took a hands-on role in government through DOGE. Governor Wes Moore, a Democrat, was an early critic of Musk’s work at DOGE, characterizing the firing of thousands of federal workers in 2025 as “arbitrary” and “draconian” during a working session in March 2025 and saying it was cruel. Boring Company president Steve Davis, one of Musk’s longtime trusted fixers, helped Musk run the government department. 

Meanwhile, in Las Vegas—where Boring has had repeated safety and environmental problems—two legislators recently sent a demand letter to Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo, requesting he address “structural failures” in the state’s oversight of Elon Musk’s tunneling startup, which has been digging tunnels below Las Vegas. The two state legislators, Assemblymember Howard Watts and Senator Rochelle Nguyen, sent a letter to the Governor, describing “significant concerns about record integrity, administrative accountability, and structural failures” in Nevada’s workplace safety system and saying that they “require clear action from the Executive Branch.” 

The pushback is largely coming from Democrats and illustrates the challenges Musk’s collection of companies are receiving as the famously impulsive and truculent multi-billionaire has turned himself into a political lightning rod.

See you tomorrow,

Jessica Mathews
X: @jessicakmathews
Email: jessica.mathews@fortune.com

Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.

Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Good morning. A new report from TD Bank U.S. finds that employees are embracing AI as a productivity tool, but they’re not ready to hand over decision-making authority.

According to TD’s second annual AI Insights Report, released on Tuesday, 83% of employed respondents said they now use AI-powered tools at work, up 20 percentage points from last year. Adoption rose across both employer-provided tools, rising to 75% from 63%, and independently accessed tools, which climbed to 78% from 66%. Respondents who use AI say it helps them work faster, generate ideas more easily, and make decisions more efficiently. Notably, 71% say AI gives them a competitive edge over peers in similar roles.

For CFOs, the signal isn’t just growing adoption. It’s a broader shift in workforce mindset: AI is increasingly being viewed less as a job threat and more as a performance lever. That has meaningful implications for how finance leaders position AI investments and workforce enablement internally.

The report also offers insight into how AI is reshaping expectations in financial services. Just over half of respondents, 55%, say they use AI to help manage their finances, up sharply from just 10% a year ago. TD’s findings are based on a nationwide survey of more than 2,500 consumers.

Even so, surveyed employees draw a clear line around decision rights. Most prefer AI to surface insights and recommendations while humans retain final authority, mirroring broader consumer sentiment around financial services. Just 18% say they would trust AI to make financial recommendations entirely on its own. Comfort was highest when AI supported behind-the-scenes functions such as product or service recommendations, fraud detection, tracking spending, and calculating credit scores.

“Consumers see real value in AI when it simplifies their experience, without losing the human touch,” according to Jo Jagadish, head of digital banking, payments and contact centers at TD Bank U.S.

Trust, however, is gradually building. Sixty-two percent of respondents say they trust AI to provide honest, reliable, and competent information, up from roughly half last year. TD Bank is also investing accordingly: The bank has roughly 2,500 employees working on AI development and has partnered with Columbia University to provide executive AI training for senior leaders.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

• The late billionaire Steve Jobs is known for being cofounder and CEO of Apple—and introducing the iPhone, iPad, and iMac to the world. However, his time at the computer company that turns 50 years old on Wednesday wasn’t what helped strike gold for his net worth. Jobs actually made the billions in 1995—three years before the iMac hit shelves—after using an unexpected career roadblock to his advantage, with a little help from Tom Hanks and Tim Allen.

“To infinity and beyond!” wasn’t just the catchphrase of Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear—it was the turning point that turned Steve Jobs into a billionaire.

After a power struggle that forced Jobs out of Apple in 1985, Jobs bought Lucasfilm’s computer graphics division the next year for $10 million. The seller was George Lucas, fresh off creating the Star Wars empire. That small acquisition would soon be renamed Pixar—and would change both Hollywood and Jobs’ fortune forever.

The company got off to a rocky start, with Jobs questioning whether to sell it multiple times, thanks in part to having to personally cover its monthly cash shortfall. But by 1995, Jobs believed Pixar was ready for primetime. In a week’s span in November, it would release its first major film, Toy Story, as well as launch an IPO.

Lawrence Levy, the company’s then-CFO, wrote that it reminded him of the 100-meter sprint in the Olympic Games: a lifetime of training that comes down to a snapshot performance.

“If the world fell in love with Toy Story, Pixar would have a chance to usher in a new era of animated entertainment,” he said in his book, To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey With Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History.

“If it didn’t, Pixar might be written off as another company that tried but never quite hit the mark.”

The IPO that made Jobs a billionaire

As the 80% owner of Pixar, the IPO stakes were even higher for Jobs. If everything went well, he was hoping to finally see some return on his Pixar investment. If everything went south, it might have shut the door on any future collaboration with Disney and led to the waste of a decade of his entrepreneurial life.

Luckily, all expectations were shattered. Pixar’s initial stock price was predicted to reach between $12 and $14, but at the end of the first day of trading, it was worth 175% more, at $39 a share. This was thanks largely to Toy Story, with Tom Hanks and Tim Allen as lead voices, nearly doubling its box office expectations. Jobs’ stake sent his net worth soaring to over $1 billion.

Jobs would later rejoin Apple in 1997, but he remained involved in Pixar as it churned out hit after hit, including Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille—each bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide. Disney fully acquired Pixar for about $7.4 billion in stock in 2006. Jobs’ stake was worth about $4.6 billion.

While Jobs is by all means known most for his role at Apple—the tech giant that turns 50 years old on Wednesday—his willingness to follow his instincts with Pixar proves the age-old advice that one key to success is finding your passion—and putting all of your energy into it.

“No matter what you do next, the world needs your energy, your passion, your impatience with progress,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in 2015. “History rarely yields to one person, but think and never forget what happens when it does.”

Finding fortune beyond their main companies

Jobs isn’t alone in being a business leader who gained significant wealth outside of what they’re primarily known for. Elon Musk has a similar story. 

While the world’s richest person is known today for being the leader of Tesla and SpaceX, that’s not how he first amassed his fortune. Musk sold his first company, Zip2, to AltaVista for more than $300 million. He also made millions through the creation of PayPal, which formed from a merger of Musk’s online financial services company, X.com, with software company Confinity, cofounded by billionaire Peter Thiel.

Similarly, billionaire Richard Branson did not make all his money from being focused on his air and space companies, Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Galactic. The 75-year-old British serial entrepreneur actually became a billionaire in part thanks to his chain of record stores called Virgin Records. It launched in 1971 and later expanded into a music label that featured artists like the Rolling Stones and Janet Jackson. Branson later sold Virgin Records in 1992 to British conglomerate Thorn EMI for $1 billion.

A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on August 21, 2025.

More on wealth and leadership:

• Warren Buffett says ‘accumulating great amounts of money’ doesn’t achieve greatness—He still lives in a $31,500 Nebraska home and clipped coupons
• Tim Cook says late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs gave him this unforgettable advice before handing over the reins as CEO: ‘Never ask what I would do’
• Despite his $2.6 billion net worth, MrBeast says he’s having to borrow cash and doesn’t even have enough money in his bank account to buy McDonald’s

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Skoda, Urquell Pilsner and Václav Havel. The number of global brands associated with the Czech Republic are few. When Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, paid homage to Havel, the first democratically elected president of what was then Czechoslovakia, in a speech he made at Davos this year, many turned to Google to refresh their memories. Now, a new player may be added to the list. 

Karel Komárek is a Czech billionaire who started buying stakes in country lotteries in 2011. The Czech Republic’s Sazka was the first, Greek gaming firm OPAP was the second. Renamed Allwyn, the company now also owns lotteries and gaming companies in the U.K., Italy, Austria, and the states of Michigan and Illinois. Its most recent acquisition was PrizePicks, the American fantasy sports operator. 

Komárek is a rare breed. The owner of a Europe-based business (Allwyn’s headquarters are now in Lucerne, Switzerland) which has become a top-two operator in its field globally. In 2024, revenues topped $10bn. A year later, Allwyn’s valuation touched $18.6bn. Only the Irish-American gambling business, Flutter, is bigger. 

Last month, Allwyn was listed on the Athens stock exchange. Now its leaders are eyeing the London and New York exchanges as potential secondary homes. 

Source: Allwyn International Q4 2025 preliminary results

“We are definitely a story of inspiration for many Czech companies to show them it’s possible to grow internationally,” Robert Chvátal, Allwyn CEO, tells me. “Actually, it’s not just possible. It’s mandatory.” 

Swaddled in regulations and operating codes, national lotteries operate a little like utilities companies do—offering stable returns over long contract periods. Add in racier gaming and gambling interests too, and Chvátal argues, you have an attractive mix. 

“Lotteries are great,” he says. “They have scale. But they are fairly mature businesses. It’s a good start. It’s a good base. But if you want to grow further, and if you say ‘We will be listed’, shareholders or investors will ask if there is a growth story. Or is it just a stable, almost utility-like, type of profile, which is more of a yield type of stock?” 

“I say we are actually a combo of both. We are a solid yield—if you take the current stock price to the communicated dividend, it’s a 6% yield, not too bad in euro terms—but, at the same time, because of the product diversification and because of the geographical diversification, we are also a growth story.” 

With the conflict in the Gulf cratering equity markets around the world and fears that investment overstretch could bring the technology hyperscalers to heel, uncomplicated bread-and-butter businesses like lotteries are a flight-to-safety option. 

Whatever the level of geopolitical volatility, millions of people like to buy a chance to win big at astonishingly long odds. When Communist Czechoslovakia banned most lotteries and closed the state-run sports gambling company, Staska, in 1953, illegal gambling flourished. Sazka was launched three years later and a state lottery started in 1957. Even the Soviets couldn’t control the urge for a flutter. 

Read more: Rishi Sunak is giving advice to CEOs on AI. Here are his golden rules

Jokes about Eastern European business standards are now a distant memory (“How do you double the value of a Skoda? Fill it with petrol” has a moldy feel, now that Skoda is owned by VW).  

“What resonates with us, if you recall Mark Carney’s speech, is his reference to the ‘middle powers’,” Chvátal says. “He actually quoted our first president, Václav Havel, and his essay The Power of the Powerless. The middle powers could become relevant.” In its chosen field, Allwyn is more than a middle power. And for Europe, that is too rare an occurrence. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

If it weren’t for a Volkswagen bus and a calculator, Apple might never have existed.

Five decades ago, the late cofounder Steve Jobs was in his early twenties and strapped for cash, but hooked on the idea that everyone should be able to own a home computer. The only problem? Like many founders, he didn’t have enough money to bring his vision to life.

So Jobs sold off his Volkswagen bus while fellow cofounder Steve Wozniak got money for his programmable calculator, raising $1,300 to pay for the prototype’s parts. The first Apple computer, the Apple I, was born on April Fools’ Day, 1976; on Wednesday, the $3.7 trillion business celebrates its 50th birthday.

And the sacrifice paid off. A local computer dealer placed a $50,000 order for 100 units soon after it launched, with the product mainly bought up by hobby enthusiasts. But it made the entrepreneurial duo enough money to create Apple II for the mass market—the first personal computer to include a keyboard and color graphics. A year after its 1977 debut, it made nearly $3 million. 

“I was worth about over $1 million when I was 23, and over $10 million when I was 24, and over $100 million when I was 25,” Jobs told PBS in 1996. “And it wasn’t that important, because I never did it for the money.”

The days of selling their belongings to fund their fledgling business were long behind them.

From college dropout to $10.2 billion net worth: Jobs’ path to Apple success

Jobs didn’t discover his passion for technology in a college class; at the age 12, the entrepreneur had already found his true calling, and took a massive leap of faith to pursue his dreams. 

A young Jobs thumbed through the yellow pages, and hunted down the phone number of Hewlett-Packard cofounder Bill Hewlett, ringing him up for a favor. At the time, the tween was in need of spare parts to build a frequency counter. But what he received was far better than some nuts and bolts; Hewlett offered Jobs an internship at the iconic $17.4 billion tech company, where he serendipitously met a talented engineer: Wozniak. 

Together, the pair started their first business, illegally selling “blue boxes” that allowed users to make free, long-distance telephone calls. Jobs reminisced about those years in the early 1970s as a “magical” time in his life that sent him on the path to soon create Apple. 

“Experiences like that taught us the power of ideas,” Jobs said in the 1998 documentary Silicon Valley: A 100-Year Renaissance. “If we hadn’t…made blue boxes, there would have been no Apple.”

Jobs later enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Ore., but his days of higher education were short-lived. He dropped out after just one semester, inevitably working for legendary brand Atari as a technician and games designer at just 18 years old. That would be the last time Jobs worked under somebody else; just two years later, Apple I hit the market, and Jobs was well on his way to becoming one of the most visionary tech pioneers in modern history. 

Fast-forward five decades later, and Apple is the second most valuable company in the world. The business sits in fourth place on the Fortune 500, having sold more than 3 billion iPhones, and boasting more than 100 million Mac users globally. 

At the time of his passing in 2011, Jobs was estimated to be worth $10.2 billion. Although he had enough money to buy a whole fleet of luxury cars shortly after founding Apple, selling his Volkswagen proved to be a critical sacrifice in making it to the top.

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on December 19, 2025.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

• In today’s CEO Daily: Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell sits down with Delta CEO Ed Bastian.
• The big leadership story: Fortune ranks the 100 Best Companies to Work For.
• The markets: A global rally is underway as Trump says the Iran war will end within weeks.
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. Ed Bastian has been the CEO of Delta Air Lines for a decade and an executive at the company for almost 30 years. As CFO and president, Bastian led the airline through a significant turnaround that began with filing for bankruptcy in 2008. It all paid off: Today, Delta is the most profitable airline in America.

Delta enjoys this title despite the fact that it gives away a chunk of profits to its 100,000 employees every year—and thanks in part to a long-term partnership with American Express, which Bastian has nurtured to be extremely lucrative. Delta-Amex cards are now responsible for over 10% of Delta’s total revenue.

I flew to Delta’s headquarters in Atlanta to interview Bastian for the Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast, and we sat among historic planes in the airline’s corporate museum hangar and talked for nearly an hour about his leadership playbook. When we spoke about his turnaround strategy, Bastian cited two other micro-turnarounds that reoriented the company: a brand overhaul and the rebuilding of team culture:

Creating a brand instead of a commodity. Two decades ago, “When you asked people why they chose an airline for their specific flight, 80% of the time it would be whoever had the lowest price,” Bastian told me. “Today, if you ask people why they choose Delta, 80% would say [it’s] because it’s Delta, because of the experience, the brand; 20% is the other stuff. So just a total flip. And so that was the most important thing, getting paid for the great service that our people do.” 

Giving Delta’s people a reason to believe and the responsibility to make it work. “You have to let your people know that you’re supporting them and putting them out front, rather than the management being out front,” Bastian said. “We’re not obsessing on customers, per se, at the leadership levels, because we want to obsess over our own people, so that they can obsess over you as a customer. When your people know that you’ve got their back, amazing things can happen. That had been lost, and bringing that back, and getting their confidence and trust back, was really key.”

Given that latter point, it’s no surprise that Delta is in the top 10 of the newest edition of the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For. You can find that list here. 

For more on how Bastian leads, where he sees the airline industry heading, and why AI won’t knock him off his people-first approach at Delta, listen to our full interview here.—Alyson Shontell

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com